Monday, April 12, 2010

Dante's Inferno

Last night I was playing on my two new PlayStation 3 games which I got yesterday. Dante's Inferno was a kind of action horror game which was very, very loosely based on the first part of The Divine Comedy a poem by Dante Alighieri. In the poem, the poet Dante is taken on a tour through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven to find his beloved Beatrice. In the game, Beatrice is captured by infernal forces and Dante, now a Crusader, has to fight his way through Hell in order to rescue her, with the help of Death's magical scythe and various magical powers to fight his way through the nine circles of Hell, fighting monsters and jumping over pits and other traps. It is a really fun game, with some really spectacular graphics. It probably also enjoys the distinction of being one of the very few action video games to be based on 14th century Italian poetry.

The other game, Heavy Rain, was really different. It was really a role-playing mystery thriller, where you have to search a rain-soaked American city for a serial killer, "The Origami Killer", before he kills his latest victim. The game got a lot of attention for it's very innovative control system where you can interact with a lot of your environment, and also hear what your character is thinking at various points in the game. The decisions that you make in the course of the game can really affect the outcome, so it's one of those games that you can play a number of times and not play the same game twice. Again it is a really amazing looking game. Two very different games, but both really good in their own ways.

Today was the start of a new week at work, and once more it was very slow, with a lot of admittedly minor but very annoying irritations. I decided to take a half day on Tuesday and a day off on Wednesday, so that should be fun. There's no real reason for the time off, I just thought that it would be a nice change. The weather was really warm and sunny again today, and I hope that it continues like that for the rest of the week.

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